Expert: Bill DeShawn - 9/7/2006

Question

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I read everything I could find on cui - articles, discussion groups, manuals.  I picked up a few things from each of them and I think I am on my way.  First I opened autocad and set custom.cui as the main menu.  We wanted this set up primarily so all our customizations would take place in our office files, not in autocad. The end goal is easier upgrades for the future.  You can't believe how much stuff I ploughed thru before I found a simple statement about how to make your custom menu your main.  Everyone says "set your custom menu as main" with no step by step info on how to do it.  After that I used cui to set acad and express as partial to that.  That was important to us so every drafter has access to all the tools that autocad has to offer.  Another article said to use workspaces to set up my work environment - again I had to search and search and piece together info to find out how to do that.  I didn't use any macros or anything special to do any of this - just autocad and trial and error. At one point I had double sets of pulldown menus in the menubar.  I don't know how that happened.  I had to start over.  I feel mildly successful.  Acad's shortcut menus start with pop501 and we had customized pop501 & 504 in our 2004 menu.  After the load, pop501 is doing fine - this is the default right click menu.  Pop 504 is there, it shows up in the cui, but it doesn't show up as a right click menu when I try to use it, only the autocad version shows up.  I really wish someone with more knowledge than I would put together a book that tells you step by step what to do - and how to get out of trouble  when you step in it.  
Followup To

Question -
We are upgrading to 2007 from 2004.  We plan to use our custom.cui as our main customization file with acad and express as partials to it.  We want our pops to show on the menu bar the "old" way with the acad pops first and the custom pops second.  How do we do this?  Will our custom shortcut menus (pops 501 and 502) show up or will the acad ones take precedence over our customizations?  I guess I really need someone to tell me step 1, step 2, etc.  I would appreciate any help you can give me.  Thanks.  Sue

Answer -
Sue:
CUI customization is new to me, too, but I got just a little head start on you.  Tell me what you steps you have taken thus far and what has resulted.  Please be explicit.  Show me exact syntaxes for macros you have used.  

By the way, do you really have 502 pop menus?  Do you have any drawing area left?

:)

I read everything I could find on cui - articles, discussion groups, manuals.  I picked up a few things from each of them and I think I am on my way.  First I opened autocad and set custom.cui as the main menu.  We wanted this set up primarily so all our customizations would take place in our office files, not in autocad. The end goal is easier upgrades for the future.  You can't believe how much stuff I ploughed thru before I found a simple statement about how to make your custom menu your main.  Everyone says "set your custom menu as main" with no step by step info on how to do it.  After that I used cui to set acad and express as partial to that.  That was important to us because we want every drafter to have access to all the tools that autocad has to offer.  

Another article said to use workspaces to set up my work environment - again I had to search and search and piece together info to find out how to do that.  I didn't use any macros or anything special to do any of this - just autocad and trial and error. At one point I had double sets of pulldown menus in the menubar.  I don't know how that happened.  I had to start over.  I feel mildly successful.  Acad is on the computers and drafters aren't doing too much groaning.  
Acad's shortcut menus start with pop501 and we had customized pop501 & 504 in our 2004 menu.  After the load, pop501 is doing fine - this is the default right click menu.  Pop 504 is there, it shows up in the cui, but it doesn't show up as a right click menu when I try to use it, only the autocad version shows up.  I really wish someone with more knowledge than I would put together a book that tells you step by step what to do - and how to get out of trouble  when you step in it.  My boss would certainly buy the book for me.

Thank you for responding to my question. I am trying to document the whole process for the next time.  If you have any ideas on the shortcut menu, I would love to hear them.





Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn


Answer
OK, Sue, try this:  type the following from the command line:
(command "menu" "custom")
I think after you do that, "custom" will be the new main menu.  Just make sure that custom.cui is in the Support File Search Path.

Keep in touch
Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn